American Legends

Gerry Lindgren setting the prep 2-mile record at San Francisco Holiday Invitational in 1963 (9:00.0).

Two young milers sprinted desperately off the last bend, not an inch between them. One was small and straggly, the other tall and fluent. The small one looked twisted tight with the terror of being beaten, the tall one seemed focused but frustrated. Side by side, they thrashed to the line, still locked. The tall one dived, plunging down. The skinny one stayed upright, struggled into a gasping jog, then slumped down. But he had won.

They were Gerry Lindgren (small) and Tracy Smith (tall), racing an all-star high school mile at Hayward Field, Eugene, Ore., in 1963. University of Oregon coach Bill Bowerman set it up as a match between Smith and Dave Wilborn, top high school milers of California and Oregon, but Lindgren, from Spokane, only 17 and still green and dizzy from his first airplane journey, went crazy (it seemed) from the gun, fought off every attack from Smith, and won in 4:12.9, his best by 5 seconds and the year's fastest high school mile.

Lindgren and Smith became two of America's best runners in a vintage era. But history gets distorted by celebrity, and today's runners barely know their predecessor's names. I open 2013 with them, because Footsteps this year will sometimes try to visit neglected spots of running history. (We'll revisit some of the greatest legends, too.)

Their eyeballs-out duel has been memorably described by Kenny Moore in his Sports Illustrated profile of Lindgren (May 1987) and in Lindgren's own quirky but deeply revealing Gerry Lindgren's Book on Running (2005), authored (the elusive Lindgren claims) by his "Shadow." Moore vividly calls him "a sparrow of a kid in oversized purple shorts." Lindgren confesses, "[My] wimpy self-image was demolished." Thus 50 years later we can conflate the outside and inside impressions.

Lindgren's most famed moment came in July 1964, when he beat two Soviet 10,000m iron-men, Leonid Ivanov and Anatoly Dutov, in the USA vs. USSR dual meet in Los Angeles. It was one of those days when this tormented young man somehow unleashed his inner tangle of trauma and self-doubt and converted it into a dynamic triumph of the will.

"At 4 miles, Gerry was wound so tightly, anything could have set him off," is how his "Shadow" describes it. "There in front of the roaring fans ... America needed a win, and here on the track a tiny boy was working a miracle."

It was a seminal race. Mills, Bob Schul, Prefontaine, Jim Ryun, and Frank Shorter all benefited from Lindgren's demonstration that a determined American could beat the world in distance running.

Lindgren's high-volume, high-intensity mileage and compulsion made him a world force until it broke him down. I witnessed another of his great races, too often overlooked, when he clung for 10 laps as an indomitable Ron Clarke (Australia) destroyed the world record for 3 miles at London's White City in 1965. They made an odd couple, the upright, serenely majestic 28-year-old multiple record-breaker, and the fervidly tenacious wraithlike teenager. Clarke transformed track distance-racing that day with 12:52.4, and Lindgren was rewarded with an American record 13:04.2 and a shared victory lap, acclaimed by the wildly overawed crowd (including me).

But in 1964, after he'd beaten Mills in the U.S. trials, Lindgren's ankle gave out two days before the Olympic 10,000m in Tokyo. The moment was missed.

Tracy Smith won U.S. titles between 1966 and 1973 from 3 miles indoors to 10,000m outdoors, and he broke the world indoor 3-mile record three times, finally with 13:07.2 in 1973. He also made a huge impression on the hard men of Europe, when as a total unknown he got third in the World Cross Country Championship in 1966, beating such greats as Michel Jazy and Ron Hill, a race Footsteps will return to next month.

Coached in Los Angeles by Mihaly Igloi, Smith looked a likely successor to gold medalists Schul and Mills when he won Olympic trials at 5,000m and 10,000m in 1968. But in the high altitude of Mexico City, Smith was only 11th in the 10,000m behind Naftali Temu (Kenya) and Mamo Wolde (Ethiopia). So his moment, too, was missed.

Smith kept running, becoming a formidable masters racer, and is a much-respected high school head coach in Oregon. Lindgren also coaches, in Honolulu. Both eschew the limelight, though Lindgren did make an idiosyncratic appearance when inducted into the National Distance Running Hall of Fame in 2004. ("I wanted to prove myself worthy," he said.) Lindgren and Smith were among the best of the remarkable generation that took America to the top of world track distance-running for the first time. They should be familiar names in every running household.

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